Saturday, 26 May 2018

Are you using an older version of Revit? Perhaps you are using a version going all the way back to Revit 2015 or Revit 2016? The question I have been asked numerous times over the last month is, why should we upgrade? The release of Revit 2019 last month is well worth consideration and the argument to upgrade from older versions of Revit, in my opinion, just got a lot stronger.

This decision also needs to be weighed against signing up for a subscription licence. Autodesk hasn't been doing so well introducing subscription to it's business model. There are endless discussions in the forums and unhappy customers. The ever increasing cost of licences has made it a hard (& bitter) pill to swallow. That together with the long and well documented history of Autodesk's fairly slow development in general, has left many people happy to settle on there final perpetual licences of 2016 / 2017. (The new "Collections" don't help either).

There has been some improvement though, more transparency from the development team and since the Revit Ideas kicked off, more interaction with customers about what we want in the software. The Revit Blog also posts a roadmap, to let you know where development is heading. So I think, for many offices, Revit 2019 may be worth a closer look in considering a possible upgrade as I believe the list of enhancements and day to day productivity gains since Revit 2016 to the now current Revit 2019, is too many to be ignored.

I have had to go back to using Revit 2016 for a number of months now in one of my jobs. I still use Revit 2018/19 regularly so going backwards so many versions has really made it obvious to me some of the updates and performance improvements I have taken for granted.

Out of interest, I decided to compile a list of all the note worthy Architectural & multi-discipline updates & enhancements to Revit since the 2016 "Release 2" update that was only available to subscription customers at the time.

I enjoyed compiling this list, it was a good refresh and reminded me of a few minor updates that I had forgotten about myself.

This turned out to be a lengthy post, so in an effort to keep it as concise as possible, I have simply listed the change/enhancement and only in some cases a short explanation. If you need more info on the update as well as a list of all minor, MEP & structural updates, I have provided all the links to the "What's New" articles as well as links to my past posts on new features.

Text editor & Text measurement - Thiswas a big update. I wrote several posts following the 2017 release and they are well worth a read as there were many issues at the time relating to text measurement in particular.

Worksharing - With the new inclusion of *'Collaboration for Revit' (C4R) the method to enable worksharing has changed. You now need to click the 'Collaborate' button on the collaborate ribbon. More info here.

Noted Performance Improvements:

Display of walls - Revit now regenerates walls only for those visible in the drawing area. If a wall is very small, it displays as simplified lines allowing for faster navigation.

Tabbed views - Faster and easier navigation of multiple windows over single and dual file use

Multi-monitor support - Many offices run dual monitors, now the primary software in your office can maximise this investment.

Levels in 3D views (grids still not available in 3D views unfortunately)

OR in filters - More complex and flexible filtering rules can now be created

Uncropped perspective view - Allows you to work in full screen perspective views

Scope boxes can be applied in 3D views

Double fill patterns - You can now combine drafting and model hatch patterns. This change has been pushed through-out the Revit interface including the materials browser.

Renaming level for corresponding views - This dialog box can now be turned off (Finally!!!)

Delete level warning dialog - If you attempted it, deleting levels was very time consuming. This simple dialog makes life much easier and deleting levels can now be done a little more confidently with a full list of effected elements.

Slow double click to rename views available

Railings can be split outside of sketch mode

Software version of files now visible in Open dialog

Dimensions for curved objects in section views (perpendicular) now available

Materials & Physical assets - The improvement to the physcial assets in Revit will see your render quality get an upgrade courtesy of the factory. Enscape have also been quick to update their software to take advantage of these new materials.

It's a long list isn't it!? Sadly, many would still not be impressed. This is always going to come down to how everyone uses Revit differently. One item of development that is typically overlooked though is performance. Whilst there are key performance updates that are noted above, it is the performance updates "under the hood", that have also had an impact in ensuring models remain speedy as the software improves (and hardware) improves.